1: Eden, Part 2

[Note: Endnotes have been stripped out.]

Dancing in the Dark:the other near-death experience

CHAPTER 1: The Beginning

Explorations

After that initial hush of hope came the question: Are these things scientific? Within three years of Moody’s book, a handful of academic and health care professionals had banded together to create the germ of “an association that would further the scientific study of NDEs and that would also serve as a support group of sorts for experiencers, as well as a clearinghouse of information for the public at large.” From that beginning came the International Association for Near-Death Studies, which quickly established a newsletter and peer-reviewed scholarly journal and began building a membership base.

The pace of publications began to pick up. In 1977, Moody brought out Reflections on Life After Life to answer some of the questions most frequently raised by the first book. A year later physician George Ritchie related his dramatic wartime near-death experience in Return from Tomorrow. Meanwhile, at the University of Connecticut, social psychologist Kenneth Ring was doing research for his book Life at Death, the first scientifically-based report about near-death experiences and experiencers.

Moody and Kubler-Ross provided the initial stories, but Ring offered quantitative measures. First, Ring developed a scale by which to measure experiences, which he dubbed the “Weighted Core Experience Index.” Individuals who reported greater detail and/or depth of experience scored higher and were labeled by Ring “core experiencers.” From his first sample of 49 core experiencers, he developed a list of the ten most common affective reactions: peace, painless, no fear, relaxed, pleasant, calm; happy, joy, quiet, warm.

Statistics! And percentages! Here was the language of quantification, giving the reports a measure of scientific credibility. Alongside Ring’s statistics, the theme of wonder continued in the words of his study participants: “. . . I remember the feeling. I just remember this absolute beautiful feeling. Of peace . . . and happy! Oh! So happy! . . . The peace . . . the release . . . It was just absolutely beautiful.”

Ring was able to conclude that “there is a consistent and dramatically positive emotional response to apparent near-death by experiencers.” He examined the aftereffects of near-death experience in greater detail than Moody, and discovered “a heightened inner religious feeling” among his 49 respondents. Comparing their responses to those of a group of 38 non-experiencers, he found 80% of the NDErs to have a lessened or lost fear of death, whereas 71% of the non-experiencers reported an increase or no change in their fear level. The strongest response came in answer to questions about belief in life after death. Although the experiencers reported themselves as having been less inclined to believe in life after death before their NDE, they were significantly more inclined than the non-experiencers to believe in it afterward (p<.01). About the aftereffects altogether, Ring concluded:“The typical near-death survivor emerges from his experience with a heightened sense of appreciation for life, determined to live life to the fullest. He has a sense of being reborn and a renewed sense of individual purpose in living, even though he cannot articulate just what this purpose is . . . The things that he values are love and service to others; material comforts are no longer so important. He becomes more compassionate toward others, more able to accept them unconditionally. He has achieved a sense of what is important in life and strives to live in accordance with his understanding of what matters.”

Life at Death would catapult Ring into the media ring. Within a year of the book’s publication, the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) was headquartered at the University of Connecticut, where Ring was inaugurating its journal. However, he was so busy fielding reporters and speaking requests that editorship of the journal went to psychiatrist Bruce Greyson at the University of Michigan.

Barely a year later, support for the observations of Moody and Ring came from a carefully crafted study by cardiologist Michael Sabom and social worker Sarah Kreutziger. Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation, the book that reported their study findings, was as readable as it was thoughtful and received widespread favorable attention. Its publication coincided with another data  treasury,  Adventures in Immortality, by George Gallup, Jr., which included the stunning news that in the adult United States population alone, “about eight million have experienced some sort of mystical encounter along with the death event.” Whereas Life After Life and Return from Tomorrow were based entirely on anecdotal information, the Ring, Sabom, and Gallup studies offered preliminary statistics to support a more systematic approach to NDEs.

By now it was relatively well accepted, at least within the field, that of people who come close to death, or who have been in a situation of extreme physical or emotional stress, 35-40% may later report a near-death experience. (Later hospital-based studies that included only people in actual cardiac arrest show rates as low as 8-10%.) However, no pointers indicated who was or was not likely to have a near-death experience. The demographic variables—age, nationality, race, religious background, education, sexual preference, marital status—suggested not a clue about which people might be expected to report one; True, it seemed at first that women were more likely than men to have an experience, but closer investigation determined that they were simply more apt to talk about it.

The circumstances of coming close to death were likewise inconclusive. Experiences were reported after all manner of vehicle accident, near-drowning, surgery and post-surgery, childbirth, allergic reaction, falling out of an airplane, electrocution, heart attack, high fever, combat, rape and other criminal attack. Disconcertingly to a fair number of people, religious beliefs—or the total lack of any religious belief —seemed to have no impact on the likelihood of having a deep experience, and suicide attempts were said to have produced some exceptionally radiant NDEs.

What had begun as great news with Moody was getting even better so far as the media were concerned. A crush of requests for appearances of one sort and another had already forced Moody to drop out of his residency in psychiatry; it would be ten years before he could complete it. Then came Ring’s Life at Death, and shortly after its appearance, his phone began to ring. When Michael Sabom’s Recollections of Death came out not long afterward, he, too, became a focus of media­ attention, and then George Gallup, Jr., with Adventures in Immortality and P.M.H. Atwater with Coming Back, and Melvin Morse and Closer to the Light—and eventually After the Light, Beyond the Light, Embraced by the Light, Saved by the Light,  Transformed by the Light—everywhere, the Light!

The ’80s were a time of public appearances. ‘Experts’ (the authors and researchers, now numbering perhaps a half-dozen) and a small number of telegenic near-death experiencers were in demand. At one end of the appearance scale were the local Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis clubs, and an occasional PTA or church group. Speakers on near-death experiences populated professional conferences and retreat centers like California’s Esalen, New York’s Open Center, and Boston’s Interface. Prospecting authors wanted interviews with experiencers so they could write a book. And then there were the electronic media . . .

From the perspective of researchers and popular near-death experiencers, media attention became a series of tsunamis—mountainous waves of requests bearing down and sweeping away everyone in their path. The important thing was to let people know the good news that they could be less fearful of death; so none of the spokespersons and certainly no one at the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) wanted to refuse any request; and if books were simultaneously promoted, that was a pleasant benefit.

And so began a seemingly endless stream of radio talk shows, doing interviews for their audiences across the country and in Canada. Radio was easy because calls could be patched to a home or office, so there was no need to travel. Television shows, on the other hand, required presence in a studio, which meant travel and a multiplication of the hours involved in an appearance.

The first national level shows to feature NDEs were out of network news departments—Good Morning, America; Today; CBS Morning News; then CNN, ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’ PM Magazine, and Unsolved Mysteries, The Other Side, Dateline, In Search Of, and others. Near-death experiences were a natural for television talk shows: Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Rolanda. The calls went out from associate producers to authors directly and to the IANDS office—usually urgent calls pleading that a show needed immediate assistance with the recruitment of what came to be thought of as “a boxed set”—one or more experts, at least one articulate and photogenic experiencer, a skeptic (preferably an MD). Almost never was there a request for clergy.

Take a map of North America and mark every city large enough to have a television station—say, a population of 50,000 or more. Now, assume that every one of the local news anchors and talk show hosts at those stations wants to locate and schedule a guest or two to talk about near-death experiences. It adds up. From the US and Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Australia, Brazil—the requests kept coming. Researchers and experiencers flew from coast to coast. Television crews invaded homes and offices—good-looking, brisk, often charming young people who arrived with a great deal of expensive (and very large) technical equipment and sometimes less praiseworthy questions. Where near-death books went, media attention followed, until the mid-1990s, when a positive frenzy over Betty Eadie’s autobiographical Embraced by the Light and Dannion Brinkley’s Saved by the Light appeared to wear everyone out, at least for a time.

A few of the programs were excellent; some were dreadful; all were over-simplified. The longer shows generally fared better, provided the host’s ambition did not lean to sensationalizing. (The producers of one hour-long New England show assured prospective guests that their objective was a balanced, thoughtful presentation—but aired the show at Halloween, with sepulchral music, clouds of spookily swirling fog, and horror film super-star Vincent Price as host.)

Whatever their quality, the shows accomplished what the tiny handful of researchers wanted, which was to implant awareness of near-death experiences squarely into public consciousness. In the early 1980s, a speaker could ask an audience, “How many of you know something about near-death experiences?” and a hand or two would go up; by the end of the decade, the question could be reversed: “Does anyone here not know something about near-death experiences?”—and in audience after audience, not a hand was raised. The Grim Reaper seemed to be out of a job.

If news of near-death experiences was a banquet, it was the authors who prepared it, the media who served it—and audiences who couldn’t get enough. More than one speaker during the first decade or so found their audiences so hungering for information, for reassurance, for anything to suggest that life may hold meaning and promise, that the sheer sense of need was nearly overwhelming. The unanticipated danger was that a great many people, experiencer and non-experiencer alike, overfull of a materialist, secular worldview and naive to the point of ignorance about religion or spirituality, had no vocabulary for such encounters, no adequate way of processing or understanding what they took in.

Unrecognized at first, the stage was set for what author and experiencer P.M.H. Atwater would later call “the myth of the near-death experience.” That myth is the expectation—even the insistence—that all NDEs are happy and peaceful, and that those who have them are effortlessly transformed, if not to saints then at least to paragons of enlightenment. Eventually, of course, the other shoe had to fall.